Blog | Able Accountants Birmingham

As part of our management accounts service we provide bespoke reporting of any accounts for whatever reporting purpose you have. Typically this is for key senior management and interests, who need bottom-line summaries of information of important data to make important decisions.

This isn’t just basic bookkeeping or statutory accounting, but making this compliant and financial information actually matter and make sense. It’s empowering the right people with the best data to make the most effective decisions.

Therefore here are 5 essential factors in any effective Management Accounts to get the accounts slicker. It might be the same old data being used, but these will help relate to people in a new way and help them digest and apply them:

1. Timing is Everything

Getting the correct frequency of these management reports is key to not only fall in line with any regular meetings and updates, but to balance enough timely information with not being overloaded by too much information overload.

It might be monthly senior management meetings, a quarterly review, or weekly update – get this established, and then plan to have the reports circulated at the meeting or before hand for people to browse through.

2. Comparison to What is Right

The main idea of management accounts is to check performance, and being able to make any business decisions to help steer things in the right direction. So firstly, know what budgets, forecasts, and KPIs you have set, before secondly making sure that actual performance data can be compared like-for-like.

Practically, these should be easy to see on the reports, with any variances noted and comparisons to past figures for similar periods.

3. Using the Right Data

It sounds obvious, but worth checking that you’re using the right data. You will need to check how this is accessed from existing bookkeeping or nominal ledger systems, and that every future report has the correct and latest information as well.

4. Adapting to the Right People

This is one of the most important factors, knowing who is the recipricant of the report, as this will affect how it is presented.

This works on both a team level as well as an individual one. You need to carefully gauge who has the final say on this, and make sure as many people as possible benefit from the final agreed format.

5. Presenting Results Well

Okay, you have the right management accounts ready to go, you just need to make sure the final figures are presented real good. And this might be more visual than you first think, so maybe a nice looking pie chart or progress line showing exactly how this all looks in reality.

Management Accounts on the Move

Applying these 5 factors to your management accounts will help bring them back to life. No one likes going through pointless information for the sake of it, particularly those who are not involved with accounts every day – they want the bottom-line answers from these accounts, and now.